How Japan Airlines crew led 367 passengers to safety from a burning plane • Hacker News Board

Re: How Japan Airlines crew led 367 passengers to safety from a burning plane

#61

Post by anticensor » Thu, Jan 04, 2024, 1:57 PM UTC

ExMachina73 wrote: post #53

eesmith wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which means running extra wires, and special locking hardware, all of which can break so calls for additional maintenance. And when it does break, you've got people in the aisle wanting their carry-ons - which may include medicine or other essential items - so you need to train the cabin crew on how to manage that situation. If power goes out in-flight, which does happen, do the storage bins stay locked, or do they f…

You make some good points, however I'm referring specifically to an evacuation situation on the ground due to fire, explosion, sinking or imminent destruction of the aircraft, where disembarking as soon as humanly possible is preferred.

In certain other emergencies however, routine disembarkation is the preferred way to deboard the plane.

Re: How Japan Airlines crew led 367 passengers to safety from a burning plane

#62

Post by steveBK123 » Thu, Jan 04, 2024, 2:30 PM UTC

anticensor wrote: post #59

peter422 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The U.S. is a very punitive society and I think if you were to find yourself in the tarmac after an evacuation holding onto your carry on, you’d at minimum be getting a large fine for disobeying a flight attendant and possibly more. Not being in the Hudson isn’t going to change the fact that you are ending up in the middle of nowhere once you are off the plane.

Then, the planes should be fitted with pilot-commanded overhead baggage locks.

The scenarios in which you want to lock the bins is precisely the scenarios where the locks are likely to fail - crashes.

It's already been reported JAL plane damage was bad enough that intercoms didn't work.

Can't lock them for the full flight, at most you can lock them during first/last 30min ascent/descent. But even there, many incidents begin in the air and precipitate an emergency landing. We will then add another item for the checklist (lock the bins) while they are supposed to be focussed on keeping the plane in the air and safely landing it?

So needless cost & complexity that will have maintenance costs, inconvenience costs.. and then have a high probability of failure in the one case it was designed for anyway.

Many problems are people problems and technology can't solve people.

Re: How Japan Airlines crew led 367 passengers to safety from a burning plane

#63

Post by eesmith » Thu, Jan 04, 2024, 3:54 PM UTC

anticensor wrote: post #60

eesmith wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which means running extra wires, and special locking hardware, all of which can break so calls for additional maintenance. And when it does break, you've got people in the aisle wanting their carry-ons - which may include medicine or other essential items - so you need to train the cabin crew on how to manage that situation. If power goes out in-flight, which does happen, do the storage bins stay locked, or do they f…

They should fail-safe to locked, to allow loading checked baggage from different customs areas into carry-on baggage compartments.

This does not seem practical.

1) Checked baggage in the baggage compartment is packed more efficiently than storing in the overhead compartment because the greater volume makes it easier to fill holes.

2) Larger planes save money by loading checked luggage into containers, and loading the entire container in one go.

3) Only small bags can be stored overhead, so this scheme requires different handling for small and large bags, which is more expensive.

4) Using carry-on baggage compartments means baggage handling staff must be in the passenger cabin to load and unload. They will likely block passengers and increase loading time, which costs money. If the baggage is loaded before passengers board, then the ground time and therefore operational costs increase because currently the baggage is loaded in parallel to passenger boarding.

5) It increases passenger dissatisfaction to have their carry-on luggage further away, which encourages people to switch to another carrier.

6) How much extra space do you think there is? I've been on many flights where people had to gate-check their luggage because the cabin ran out of space. Think of the cost if 20 bags had to be gate-checked into the baggage hold because 20 bags had been moved to the carry-on section. (And airlines don't know precisely how much carry-on baggage there will be, because people can buy things after check-in.)

Re: How Japan Airlines crew led 367 passengers to safety from a burning plane

#64

Post by dehrmann » Thu, Jan 04, 2024, 5:52 PM UTC

jase321 wrote: post #57

Freak_NL wrote: post #3

I am inclined to think that this exact same scenario featuring a plane full of not Japanese, but, say, Dutch, English, or Americans, would not have resulted in a full evacuation in 18 minutes; possibly with casualties. Obeying commands as a group in a high-pressure situation? That takes a lifetime of living in a culture where this is normal. A group of military passengers (any nationality) would probably have worked…

I have taken countless Delta and UA flights. I can attest 100%, had this scenarios happened on those flights, near death certainty for those passengers. 90sec from my years of observations not doable by ANY Delta or UA flights unless maybe small 737 with maybe a third full. Their crews and the type of passengers they have guarantee death in this kind of situation. Heck even if you give them 10 mins instead of 90sec,…

> Their crews...guarantee death in this kind of situation

I was recently on a UA flight where, maybe 15 seconds after takeoff, a flight attendant rushed out of her jumpseat to try to shield a passenger from a bag from an overhead bin that had just popped open.

n=1, but when it comes down to it in an emergency situation, I bet the flight crew takes their responsibilities very seriously.

Re: How Japan Airlines crew led 367 passengers to safety from a burning plane

#65

Post by mmkos » Thu, Jan 04, 2024, 7:36 PM UTC

tim333 wrote: post #54

mmkos wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it was because of a human error. A passenger plane landed on a runway that already had another plane on it. At least have a proper alerting system in place, we've had the tech for decades, you don't even need AI for any of it... but changes in commercial aviation unfortunately seem to be driven by accidents more than forethought.

I'm not sure what existing tech would have saved things? It seems the problem was the smaller plane was told to wait at a holding point and said ok but thought he could take off for some reason.

I don't want to sound crude but... really? How about a few sensors to check for aircraft presence on the runway and some way to feed that information to surrounding traffic? There's a million different ways this could be done, you just need a little bit of imagination.